Abstract
This research chapter sheds light on the digital transformations that are happening in the medical industry and primarily focuses on how digital transformation processes are introduced and adapted into China's medical industry. Furthermore, the authors explore the characteristics, socio-economic impact, changes in business models and consumer experience, introduction, and restructuring of relevant government policies caused by these digital transformations. They also bring to light the opportunities, challenges, and risks that may present in the future. The authors take two case studies for demonstrating the impact: first, the intelligent assistance system that leverages 5G+AI and, second, the body temperature monitoring system that leverages the IoT and Bluetooth. Through the comparison of these two successful case-studies, they can realize that the impact of AI technologies and thereby the digital transformations will play a major role in the future of medical industry. They also explore the problems of digital transformation in the field of medical care with the help of a few case studies like IBM Watson.
Top2. Background
Starting in early 2000s, China's medical field has gone on an extensive digital exploration. According to Xiong (2020), the development of Internet medical care in China is relatively slow due to the influence of regulations, policies, and resistance of the existing medical systems to adapt and change. However, after the COVID-19 outbreak in 2019, China's Internet medical services ushered in new opportunities for technology development. With the help technologies like IoT, AI and Robotics the nation's medical systems are undergoing speedy digital transformation. In a way the pandemic has made us rethink and reimagine the systems of today. Pushed all stakeholders to think differently and improvise on the go. Technology has especially played a crucial role during these times, as we had to work around constraints like contactless patientcare. Xiong (2020) pointed out that the pandemic has promoted changes in the behavior of doctors and patients at both the diagnosis and the treatment phase. In China, the uneven distribution of medical resources and the mismatch between patients and doctors are important factors for friction in doctor-patient relationship (Zhang et al., 2020). At the same time, the rapid development of medical digitalization is expected to achieve efficiency improvement and resource integration to a certain extent, alleviating the imbalance between China's medical resources and service supply and demand. According to China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (2021), the outbreak of COVID-19 is expected to prompt the Internet medical industry to break through the bottleneck and usher in explosive growth in 2021. Under the dual influence of favorable policies and the COVID-19, digital transformation in the medical field will be the trend of the times.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Rehabilitation: The action of restoring someone to health or normal life through training and therapy after imprisonment, addiction, or illness.
Contextualized Doctor-Patient Relationship: A special relationship between physicians and patients in the medical field. This kind of interpersonal relationship is presented in a concrete form in medical situations, involving the communication between medical staff and patients.
Teleconsultation: A new type of medical treatment method that uses modern communication tools such as emails, websites, telephones, and faxes to complete medical record analysis, disease diagnosis, and determine treatment plans for patients.
Semi-Automatic Image Segmentation Analysis: One of the methods of image segmentation. The image is divided into the target area and the background area, and then the edge of the target area of the image is optimized by the relevant algorithm, and accurate object shape information is obtained through a large number of experiments.
Virtual Assistant Systems: A system that can help doctors, nurses, and technicians to quickly diagnose and administer care by reducing the number of steps and saving time. For example, the voice electronic medical record system is a virtual assistant system that helps doctors quickly enter medical records through voice-to-text.
Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS): A clinical assistant decision-making system that follows evidence-based medicine by learning from a large number of clinical guidelines, pharmacopoeia and high-quality medical records of tertiary hospitals, based on natural language processing, knowledge graph and other AI technologies.
Ultrasound: Sound or other vibrations having an ultrasonic frequency, particularly as used in medical imaging.